In the Nepali district of Bidur, rescuers pulled 24 bodies from under layers of mud — all of them were found in one building. Among the victims is a child, CNN reports. Police Chief Bipin Regmi does not hide the fact that this is likely not the final number.
We suspect that there are more bodies buried there
A practical question arises immediately: why did one house become a trap for so many people at once. According to Betravatі Mangal Tamang, a representative of the municipality, the dead are predominantly adults, with only one child. This suggests that the building may have served as a temporary shelter for several families who fled there during the flood, hoping for stronger walls or a higher floor — and did not manage to escape when water and mud blocked the exits.
The logistics of death: why bodies are being transported by aircraft
Six bodies have already been delivered to Kathmandu by air transport — not by car, not by train, but by helicopter. This detail itself explains the scale of destruction: ground routes to the affected region are either destroyed or dangerous. The remaining bodies remain in the city and await evacuation by the same route.
Search operations will continue near neighboring houses — rescuers do not rule out that people, alive or dead, may be under the layer of silt. This means that the official statistics on flood victims will almost certainly increase in the coming days.
Not just a Nepali tragedy
Parallel to the search in Bidur, a separate, narrower-focused operation is underway in Nepal: DNA identification among 56 Ukrainians who are considered missing following the same natural disaster. Two processes — a large-scale operation to excavate rubble and precise laboratory work on identification — are happening simultaneously, and it is the second that will answer how many Ukrainians are among the victims of this flood.
The question that remains open: if rescuers confirm fears about "more bodies" under the rubble in just this one house, how much will the overall picture of losses across the entire Bidur region change?
